Agency Staff And Holiday Cover

Late summer and early autumn can be prime times for regular care home staff to take annual leave. Those with young families might be after last-minute summer holiday deals before heading back to school. Meanwhile, those without children may be waiting for early September and the return of schools and colleges to snag an off-season holiday bargain. Add in the late August bank holiday weekend, and you have all kinds of reasons why you might need to look for agency cover at this time of year.

Welcoming bank, or care agency workers to help fill your staffing gaps can work very well. However, it takes a great deal of planning ahead of their arrival – and support and guidance while they are with you. Systems and routines that regular staff take for granted must often be learned from scratch by agency cover workers. Relationships built up with residents and their families over longer periods of time must be put on hold while agency staff temporarily take the place of more familiar faces among the care home team.

Care planning software

Having access to digital care management software can prove a huge benefit when integrating agency workers into a team. Resident records, eMAR charts and other monitoring tools are easily retrieved with the right passwords and access permissions. This means that temporary staff don’t have to continuously ask permanent colleagues for paper folders, updates and previous data to help them track residents’ health conditions, symptoms and behaviours manually.

Clever communications

Digital planning tools also help agency staff and permanent team members communicate with each other quickly and easily. Tools such as an internal messaging centre, real-time alerts and updates and a staff app that shows shifts, rotas and holiday periods helps everyone work out where fellow staff members are – or should be – and what their next bank shifts will be. Care home managers can also contact agency staff individually or as a group when they have an important instruction or update to share.

Admin, policies and audits

Busy care managers do not always have time to go through every single policy, document and file with new agency recruits, especially if there are different people arriving for various shifts to cover holidays and absences. Directing new staff to Care Vision allows them to read and get up to speed on important policies, processes and auditing requirements, all in one easy, digital place. Agency staff can also complete time sheets, clock in electronically and request shift changes via the same Care Vision interface.

Joined up care

The often transient nature of agency staff working shifts means that workers may not always be allocated to the same care home, nor work with the same residents each time they are called in to cover or increase regular staff. However, with Care Vision’s monitoring and record-keeping tools, carers can log in and instantly see the records for their allocated residents, including medication records, nutrition requirements, medical history, diagnoses, preferences and more. Meaning agency staff can get started on providing excellent, joined-up care from the very beginning.

Appraisals, feedback and performance review

While agency staff do not tend to be part of formal staffing appraisal procedures at the care homes they visit, they will usually still be required to meet certain standards in quality of care, personal behaviour and completion of duties. Data gathered from Care Vision’s monitoring and additional features can help provide helpful evidence of the nature of agency staff’s care skills, bedside manner, punctuality and more. Family members, residents and regular staff can also use the app to record feedback and observations.

Future proofing

Positive comments and appraisals provided via Care Vision can help agency staff be invited back to the same setting, which benefits everyone. It builds trust between the agency staff and residents and gives care home managers a network of reliable people to call on when permanent team members are sick, absent or on holiday. Returning agency workers can start work far quicker, having already been trained in how to use Care Vision and its features. Learning how to use care planning software can also help the agency staff, as more and more care settings are signing up to digital care systems and will favour people who already understand how they work.